Business|Mirror, Mirror in the App: What’s the Fairest Shade and Shadow of Them All?

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Mirror, Mirror in the App: What’s the Fairest Shade and Shadow of Them All?

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L’Oreal employees demonstrate how to use the company’s new app.CreditCreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times

By Hilary Stout

May 14, 2014

As any lipstick shopper knows, deciding between tropical coral, peony pink and fairest nude is not a straightforward choice.

And without being able to apply new colors, to pucker or smile in a shade unknown, it is quite easy to buy a fashion mistake.

Now, one beauty company has come up with a high-tech way to figure it out, and others are experimenting with bringing a virtual makeup counter to their customers.

On Thursday, L’Oréal will introduce an app that turns the front-facing iPhone and iPad camera into a makeup mirror that allows customers to virtually try on more than 300 cosmetic products and see immediately different looks or complete makeovers on their own faces.

They can pout, sneer, move in and out of changes in lighting or shadows, and the virtual makeup stays as if it had been painted on. (A recent test confirmed that the virtual makeup will move with expressions, although vigorous head-shaking seemed to dislodge some heavy eye shadow a bit.)

The app, called Makeup Genius, was developed in partnership with Image Metrics, a company known for its facial mapping in movies and video games.

The app is yet another manifestation of a race among businesses to be connected to the consumer on every device, a competition that has left cosmetic companies far back in the pack. But it also is a notable advancement toward the concept of an “interactive mirror” that has long fascinated some in the beauty and fashion industries.

“There is some good history on this one,” said James L. McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, who wrote about the idea of a “magic mirror” and says he has been contacted by many health and beauty companies since then. Most efforts to date, he said, have not been truly successful.

Still, companies keep trying. The notion of being able to see what the dress or sunglasses or sandals you are about to order really would look like on you — not the willowy model shot at just the perfect angle with who knows how much retouching — seems to be the ultimate in consumer convenience and empowerment. It also holds the possibility of a substantial savings boon for all those companies shouldering expensive rapid shipping and returns costs.

Warby Parker, the online glasses retailer, has a try-on function that lets consumers upload a picture of themselves to see what various frames look like on their faces. A competitor, glasses.com, which was recently purchased by the eyewear giant Luxottica, has an app that creates a 3-D model of shoppers’ faces for virtual try-ons and lets them adjust the glasses on their faces by touching the screen. Cisco and others have developed virtual dressing room technology, though it has not been widely adopted.

There is also a growing genre of makeup (or makeover) apps, including Perfect 365, FaceTune and Visage Lab, that make it possible for people to touch up their photos, eliminating a pimple here, a wrinkle there, putting a flush in cheeks, even shaving off a pound or two — the better for posting on Instagram and elsewhere.

But the new L’Oréal app deals strictly in reality — how its products look on a potential customer’s untouched face — for better or worse. It also offers a chance to virtually try 16 “curated looks,” like “smoky eyes” devised by the celebrity makeup artist Billy B.

To accomplish the virtual mirror effect, the L’Oréal app had to be intuitive enough to discern between, say, the skin of lips, cheeks and other facial features. Developers said they tested lip, eye and cheek products on hundreds of people of numerous ethnicities in 400 different lighting conditions and conducted extensive studies, including how a product dries on the skin. The company would not say how much money it invested in the effort.

“While we provided the facial mapping technology, working with L’Oréal to ensure what consumers ultimately see in the app — in terms of color, texture, opacity, shine and overall look — that was tremendous,” said Ron Ryder, the chief executive of Image Metrics.

The app is the first major project to come out of a high-tech incubator that the beauty company opened a year and a half ago in a suburban office building in Clark, N.J., about 30 minutes outside New York City. There, a team of Ph.D.s, physicists, computer scientists and others is working to help the company develop a high-tech relationship with the consumer in a field that doesn’t naturally lend itself to connectivity.

“The reason why we started it is we see the beauty consumer has changed in terms of what they actually want in a product and an experience,” said Guive Balooch, global director of the company’s Connected Beauty Incubator, who has a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering and came to L’Oréal from the pharmaceutical field. “We are moving more and more toward service, personalization, toward customization.”

Though L’Oréal plans to unveil the Makeup Genius app this week in New York and Cannes, France, during the annual Cannes Film Festival, it won’t be available to consumers until June, and this first phase will not be available on Android devices. Products won’t be for sale on the app itself — at least not yet.

Correction:May 19, 2014

An article on Thursday about a L’Oréal app that will let iPhone and iPad users virtually try cosmetic products, using information provided by L’Oréal, erroneously attributed a distinction to its partner in the app, the visual effects company Image Metrics. Image Metrics worked on visual effects for the film “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” but it did not win an Oscar for that work. (The Oscar for Best Achievement in Visual Effects in that film went to four individuals — Eric Barba, Steve Preeg, Burt Dalton and Craig Barron. Mr. Barba and Mr. Preeg worked for Digital Domain, a visual effects company that received support services from Image Metrics.)

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Mirror, Mirror in the App: What’s the Fairest Shade (or Shadow) of Them All?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe